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Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

dehype.org

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Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#3
> While Canonical is happy to accept thousands of hours of free work in bug fixes and quality assurance of their code, they are not interested in letting the community have a meaningful say in its conception.

Which solves the problem of design by committee and results in a great desktop experience. I love how Unity is preserving space on my 13.3" screen and how Ubuntu team made all the choices for me and then made it all work together -- I don't have to customize a thing (I use all the default applications and don't even change the background).

I remember the times when it took a day or more to install an operating system, all the necessary applications, and move your data and settings. With Ubuntu nowadays it takes less than an hour (including some hacks around the still rough edges, like reducing power usage) to have a completely up and running Linux installation. Hopefully, Mark Shuttleworth will stay on that course, because it's working great.

Disclaimer: I'm not a core member of any team, I filed two bugs overs years of using Ubuntu. Everything above and below is written from my very subjective perspective and it's entirely possible that I'm just not a very sophisticated user -- give me a browser, a terminal, hide all that other stuff and I'll be happy. Though Unity did convince me to start using Gwibber, Empathy and some other apps from their integrated tray.

> Gnome is a community-driven project through-and-though, yet it has recently come under fire for the way it has developed the latest incarnation of their desktop.

Yes, because their community-driven approach to design led them down the path of reinventing the wheel:

> Instead of picking existing components and giving them the final polish like Ubuntu did before, the GNOME project started developing things from scratch without any apparent reason to do so. And even worse: incompatible to existing solutions. It started with the rejection of the appindicator specification implemented by Ubuntu and KDE. At that point it was not clear to me whether the specification was broken or whether the responsible people at GNOME were just ignorant.

> Then came systemd. And it started to be apparent that unfortunately it was the latter.

http://www.rojtberg.net/457/gnome-project-suffering-the-nih-...

And if that's what developers want to do, great, but it probably will not result in a great desktop environment any time soon.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#4
more accurate title: "ubuntu: i don't like what you're doing anymore."

ubuntu isn't doing anything wrong. they're not doing things the old way, nor are they pretending to. it's top down control with unilateral decisions, but that's what's necessary to move forward. for a product to come out well, decisions have to be made. if you listen to everybody, you get a product that sacrifices quality in favour of not pissing anybody off, like linux mint with it's three distinct pre-installed media players.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#5
As we get closer to the next big version (wherein most of the apocalyptic changes take place) I'll be reading HN for useful lists of alternatives. Anyone with useful suggestions can chip in now of course :)

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#6

Columns do not work on the web.

I had fun making a horizontal web page once.

It might have worked better if the columns were more segmented so that you didn’t have to scroll down and up and then down again. That way you could get more content for less scrolling and maintain comfortable line length.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#8
If you don't like the direction that the current default Ubuntu desktop is going, I suppose you could always try one of the variants, such as [Lubuntu](http://lubuntu.net/). That's where I'll probably head, since I'm running an older Ubuntu release and I'm pretty sure I'd rather not switch to Unity upon upgrading.

I can't blame Ubuntu for wanting to make their default desktop experience the way they want. It's their project.

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#9
post #4

more accurate title: "ubuntu: i don't like what you're doing anymore." ubuntu isn't doing anything wrong. they're not doing things the old way, nor are they pretending to. it's top down control with unilateral decisions, but that's what's necessary to move forward. for a product to come out well, decisions have to be made. if you listen to everybody, you get a product that sacrifices quality in favour of not pissing…

I think Canonical's new direction is a breath of fresh air in the world of Linux. We already have so many Linux distros, and what has that gotten Linux? 1 % of the consumer market? Can we just have one Linux distro that is consumer-oriented, and tries to shake things up a bit?

Re: Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

#10
I'm happy to see a big player in the open-source world take a design-focused approach to software development. The author may not like Apple's design, but their top-down approach has led to products that are loved by many. It would be great to see this approach succeed in open-source, so that we end up with well-designed products that preserve the freedoms of open-source.
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